Branding Training Exercises and Resources

This is a creativity exercise that encourages delegates to create a story together as a group. It is ideal for team building, acting and creativity. You can also modify the exercise to limit its scope to match specific training needs. For example, the nature of the story can be limited to current affairs so that the focus is on journalism. Alternatively, you can limit it for marketing, branding or creative story telling.

This exercise helps to develop delegates’ observational skills on advertisement and marketing and also helps them design their own ads. It creates discussions on what works and what does not in designing an advertisement. Delegates can use this knowledge to get inspired and create effective and interesting advertisements for their products.

Modern tools can provide a great insight on how certain terms have been used in the past. With the advent of search engines and in particular the ever more useful tools released by Google we can examine the index of millions of books and observe the popularity of certain terms in literature.

This exercise is meant to be an exploratory activity where delegates sit behind computers and use the tool to test out the use of various terms. The tool is known as Google Books Ngram Viewer which is the result of indexing thousands of books.

Initially, you will give delegates specific terms to research and later you can let them use the tool freely to see what insights they can come up with.

This exercise is useful for courses on marketing, branding, writing, languages and art.

This exercise is based on the use of modern tools that can give us an insight on people’s current interests. The exercise provides a template for a variety of exercises that you can conduct based on your specific training needs. Here are some applications:

Marketing. You want to get the delegates explore the popularity of certain terms in a given market in your marketing training course.

Team building. You want to help delegates find a particular topic to talk about and get to know each other better. The exercise provides a framework about a trending topic to discuss.

Branding. You want to get the delegates explore the popularity of certain brands in relation with each other and see if it fits their perception. You can then focus to see what this means in practice.

Optionally you can also consider running this exercise as a competition between groups.

Some people are naturally quiet. They don’t see much need to talk about themselves or share what they have accomplished with others. They are always in danger of getting overshadowed by extrovert types who are hell-bent to tell everyone how great they are. Between the two extremes, there is a middle ground that consists of saying enough to be noticed but not too much to become annoying. We live in a competitive world today and it is important to be able to tell others about what you have accomplished and what you are good at or you will be overlooked and forgotten.

This exercise is particularly useful for those quiet types who may need a push and a structured approach in practicing this skill. Learning this important skill will allow them to become better at talking about themselves and their ideas, values and achievements without appearing over bearing or self-centred.

You can run this exercise for an existing team or for a group of individuals from different backgrounds. Even those who are not naturally quiet would benefit from the structured approach used in this exercise to practice their story telling techniques.

Imagine attending a training course which at the time you thought was fine and covered a good range of content that you didn’t know about. Sometime later, your colleague asks you about the course and to your shock you realise that you cannot remember much about it. It feels as if it was years ago that you’ve attended it even though it was only a month ago. Funny enough, you remember that you thought at the time that it was actually a good course; it was very informative. You explain this to your colleague but you cannot help wondering why you don’t remember much of the course or the actual content covered. Of course you don’t share this part with your colleague. You don’t want him to think that your memory is poor or worst that you wasted company resources by attending a course that you didn’t get much from.

You put it to your hectic workload and think nothing of it. You finish off your conversation with your colleague as you need to press on with the next meeting…

What is going on? Are training courses supposed to be like this or is there something more fundamental taking place? Or, to ask the question in a different way, as a trainer is there something you can do to avoid the above eventuality?

This is a feel-good training exercise that gets everyone involved in a creative activity. In this exercise, delegates get to create a variety of illustrations or produce crafts which resemble the logo of their company.

The creative effort is a useful team building activity that brings people closer together by working on something similar and by having a common light-hearted objective. It also makes staff feel warmer towards the company through association by working on the logo.

The results of delegates efforts will be a series of artwork produced in various styles and with different materials all resembling the logo of the company. The logos can then be then displayed in the foyer of the company where customers and visitors can observe them. It could signal that the company is a fun place to work in and that staff care about the company and are happy to be there.

This exercise helps to define the company brand more clearly by using associations. It can be used for marketing and sales, but is also useful for management and staff. The exercise is a good opportunity to illustrate what the company is and is not and which values are more important than others.

Companies develop different cultures. It is important to know how the company is seen both internally and externally. Internally, it helps to bind the team and make everyone coordinate their efforts so they can produce consistent results. Externally, it leads to a solid brand where customers know exactly what the company represents and how the company’s products and services are provided. Customers can relate how a company conducts with their own specific character which in turn forms the brand identity.

In this exercise, delegates get to analyse their company on a number of categories and choose a specific style for each type. They can then analyse this data to see if this is indeed how they want the company to be seen and what may need to be changed.

It is ideal to run this exercise for delegates who are from the same organisation. If not, you may need to adjust the exercise accordingly by putting delegates from a company in the same group.

Use this exercise on storytelling to encourage creative and spontaneous thinking. This exercise is ideal for courses such as presentation skills and public speaking as well as any course that can benefit from storytelling skills such as improving personal impact.